Students learn and practice all the aspects of singing and reading music

Singing - vowel production, how to change a vowel so that it sounds good when you sing and is still understandable, the phonetic alphabet and pure vowels, dipthongs(two vowels for one word or syllable) for words like joy (oh ee) and tripthongs(three vowel sounds), consonant production - those with pitch, z, th, d, and v, those without, t, c, ch, k, those to avoid, r and s. Singing is other languages including italian, french, spanish, german, latin, zulu, swahili, and others. Matching pitch, singing a phrase of music. Harmonizing - sing one note while another person or group sings a different note. Learning to sing a major scale when given any starting pitch. Learning the solfege syllables(Do Re Mi, etc) for the major and ultimately the minor scale using both the syllables and hand gestures.

Reading Music - Notes and rhythm. Learning the major key signatures and their relationships in the circle of fifths. Being able to to identify Do in any key. Following and singing the correct rhythms - whole, half, quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes, dotted notes and rhythmic patterns such as dotted 8th, 16th. Read music in different time signatures. Read music in treble and bass clef, depending on voicing. Follow a vocal part and piano and rhythm section where there is multiple staves. Identify your relative starting pitch based on the other voices and instruments given. Read a line or a piece of music cold, having never sung or heard it before. Read a line of music using solfege syllables and hand gestures.

LPMS Bell Choir

Longs Peak has a set beautiful set of hand bells and has had the opportunity to offer a bell choir in the last several years. Playing in a bell choir involves reading music, playing your instrument/s, a ringer often plays two or three bells in a particular piece, working together with the other ringers, following the director and carefully caring for the bells themselves. You can picture playing a melody like twinkle twinkle little star. Each member of the choir plays a different note in the melody and must play it at the proper moment so that the audience hears the melody as one voice. Add harmony and an accompaniment to that and it is quite challenging and quite rewarding when you get it right.

LPMS Piano Keyboarding/Basic Music Theory

There is a great interest in piano and keyboarding at Longs Peak. We currently offer piano as an eighth grade elective. Though the national statistics are not known, very few students in our community take piano lessons as a child. Piano skills are a fundamental part of any musical education. Most instrumentalists, band, orchestra, and singers must have some knowledge and experience with a piano keyboard. To teach music reading of any kind without referring to a piano keyboard is nearly impossible. So most intro to music books contain at least a minimal section on how to identify notes on a keyboard. This class begins with music reading simultaneously with fundamental piano skills. We learn the note names on the piano and finger placement and hand position. We quickly move to basic chords and chord structure. We learn to identify the I, IV and V/V7 chords, the fundamental structure of most every song. Students choose a song of their own and learn how that song fits in the chord structure. We have a section where we use ukuleles to recognize the basic chord structure. Uke’s are useful because you can very quickly learn a couple chords and can accompany a song within a short amount of time.